Obama Administration Calls for Input on Accelerating New Learning Technologies

The Obama administration is asking education leaders for their ideas on accelerating the development of high-impact learning technologies.

As part of the Education Datapalooza event held today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy called for input from education leaders, tech leaders, nonprofits and federal agencies on using incentives and other "pull mechanisms" to help drive "the development, rigorous evaluation, and widespread adoption of high-impact learning technologies."

According to information published by the administration today, OSTP is looking to expand the incentive mechanism used on challenge.gov with an emphasis specifically on learning technologies. The office sent a request for information to a number of organizations, including state and local education agencies, asking them "what roles they would be willing to play in the design, funding, and implementation of pull mechanisms for learning technology."

Some technologies cited as examples by OSTP included:

Technologies that would decrease the "vocabulary gap" between wealthy and poor students;

Tools to help American students outperform their international counterparts in math and science tests;

ELL supports;

Programs that would certify the skills or cognitive abilities of students who are not college-bound but might need such certifications for their jobs; and

Math remediation for community college students.

"Currently, there is a large gap between the relatively modest impact that technology has had on education, particularly in K-12, and the transformative impact that it has had in many aspects of our economic and social life," according to OSTP. "For example, businesses are using information and communications technologies to dramatically increase productivity, tap the expe1iise of their employees, slash the time needed to develop new products, tailor products and services to meet the needs of individual consumers, orchestrate global networks of suppliers, derive insights from huge volumes of transactional data, and improve their products and services by conducting rapid, low-cost experiments.

"Education, particularly K-12 education, remains relatively untouched by advances in our understanding of how people learn, how to design instruction that incorporates those insights, and the explosion in information technologies such as low-cost smartphones and tablets, cloud computing, broadband networks, speech recognition and speech synthesis, predictive analytics, data mining, machine learning, intelligent tutors, simulations, games, computer-[supported] collaborative work, and many other technologies."

David Nagel is editorial director, education for 1105 Media's Public Sector Media Group and editor-in-chief of THE Journal. A 22-year publishing veteran, Nagel has led or contributed to dozens of technology, art and business publications.

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